Varieties of Principled Libertarianism

It remains a mistake for Libertarian Party reformers and incrementalists to concede that Zero-Aggression ZAPsolutism is the purest or most principled brand of libertarianism -- as opposed to most simplistic. I realize there are some asymptotic anarchists who nevertheless believe that incrementalism is the best thing a political party could do to move toward their anarchotopian asymptote. That may or may not be true, but I won't try to talk them out of it. :-) If I were an asymptotic anarchist, my top priority for electoral politics would be neither to build cadre nor promote incrementalism . Rather, I would advocate radical federalism, so that some locality somewhere would eventually try something close to anarchism and prove that it actually has a hope in hell of working.

Luckily, I'm not a ZAPsolutist or asymptotic anarchist, and in fact consider minarchism based on modern economics (see below) to be the most principled brand of libertarianism. Why? Because I believe that it does the best job of minimizing the real-world role and incidence of aggression in society. I consider ZAPsolutists to be suboptimal libertarians, because as deontologists instead of consequentialists they explicitly value clean hands over the real-world minimization of the incidence of aggression. (Either that, or they indulge in some magical thinking in order to believe that, for our species of primate on this particular planet, it just so happens that 100% absolute aggression abstinence is always the optimal strategy for minimizing the net incidence of aggression, and that no investment in force-initiation could ever lead to a net reduction in overall force-initiation.) However, I don't insist that the Platform endorse my brand of libertarianism as the most principled. We can have that fight when we're done repealing the nanny state. For now we just need to agree as comrades that there is a range of equally-principled libertarian worldviews and that it is not a sellout to try to get all less-archists together on a Freedom Train heading straight north in Nolan Space.

Multiple principled and self-consistent libertarian worldviews can be assembled from combinations of elements like

• radical federalism;
• geolibertarian sharing of resource commons;
• left-libertarian critiques of alleged coercion inherent in original property acquisitions and unequal economic associations;
• libertarian paternalism based on game-theoretic analysis of bounded rationality;
• the theory of public goods and free rider problems;
• the theory of natural monopolies; and
• the theory of negative externalities .

Endless variations on those principled and self-consistent libertarian worldviews can be derived by changing the dials on the many free variables in libertarian theory, such as:

• Enfranchisement variables
  • rights of animals and species
  • rights of the unborn
  • rights of children
  • rights of the mentally disabled
  • rights of the comatose, the cryonically suspended, etc
  • rights of the dead (e.g. to bind the living with a covenant)
  • rights of inheritance
  • rights of corporate persons
  • rights of persons to alienate their rights e.g. through contractual slavery
    
• Property variables
  • rights in natural (i.e. non-excludable) resources e.g. atmosphere, water, non-solid minerals, spectrum, orbits
  • rights in excludable resources e.g. land, solid minerals
  • rights in intellectual property e.g. copyright, patents
  • justness of original property acquisition
  • status of stolen property
• Aggression variables
  • whether blackmail is aggression
    
  • forms of allowable judicial punishment
  • rules for allowable extra-judicial defense and retaliation
  • thresholds for reckless endangerment
  • extent to which unequal associations are coercive

Thus those who believed Rothbard when he told them that the non-aggression principle is "the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory" have been sold a bill of goods. Rothbard may as well have been chanting "There is no god but God". Libertarians weaned on Rothbard or Rand seem unaware of the innovations in political economy that have occurred since their prophets closed the paleolibertarian canon in the late 1940s:

• The 1939 generalization of Pareto optimality by Kaldor and Hicks to launch modern welfare economics;
• The 1950 formalization of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the subsequent avalanche of developments in game theory;
• Arrow's 1951 impossibility theorem, leading to Sen's 1970 liberal paradox;
• The 1953 discovery of the Allais paradox, and many subsequent discoveries about bounded rationality and cognitive bias and the development of Prospect Theory by Tversky and Khaneman in 1979;
• Samuelson's 1954 formalization of the theory of public goods;
• Tiebout's 1956 theorem about the optimal local provision of public goods;
• Coase's 1959 proof that markets can handle negative externalities only in the absence of transaction costs;
• The 1962 creation of public choice theory by Buchanan and Tullock; and
• Arrow's 1963 formalization of the problem of asymmetric information.

For example, Rothbard's For a New Liberty (1973) and Ethics of Liberty (1982) make no mention of public goods or externalities or free riding. And anyone learning their economics only from Rand will have even less hope of awareness of these ideas.

The cumulative revolution in the theory of political economy that took place in the 1950s and 1960s is very recent by historical standards. Students of biology and anatomy long ago stopped reading Aristotle's 2300-year-old treatises, with his theories that head-first birth in animals is caused by weight asymmetry around the umbilical cord, and that the brain's function is just to cool the blood. But progress in the theory of political economy has been so slow that after two millennia, Aristotle's political theories are still required reading. It was only 50 years ago that economists formulated the theoretical foundations of what is now the textbook economic analysis of the optimal scope of government. That analysis is profoundly libertarian, and it's just bizarre that a party calling itself "Libertarian" hasn't embraced it. The reason for this is a historical accident, in that the ideology of the LP was dictated in the 1970s by someone (Murray Rothbard) who froze his own anarcholibertarian dogma a decade or so before the cumulative revolution in the 1950s and 1960s in the areas of modern welfare economics, public choice theory, behavioral economics, and information economics.

A pioneer of string theory said in the 1970s that it is "a part of twenty-first-century physics that fell by chance into the twentieth century". Unlike physics, economics has not often had to wait on (or invent) new mathematics in order to make progress. I sometimes get the feeling that much of twentieth-century economics was in retrospect somewhat obvious and should have been already been developed before 1900. It would have been nice if the insights of modern economics had been available as the libertarian movement became self-conscious in the early decades of this century, but it was not to be. Oh well, at least we'll have front-row seats as the insights of modern economics continue to seep into our culture's political consciousness. The question of why the LP disputed those insights instead of championed them will make for an interesting footnote in future history books.